Barbara Helen Farnell

Barbara DeVoss Farnell, a career educator with the Dallas Independent School District whose language and social studies programs on KERA-TV help lay the foundation for what later would become the Public Broadcasting System, has died of natural causes at age 88. From 1962 to 1971, her twice-daily programs were beamed from The Little Red School House on Harry Hines. An average of 85,000 elementary school children a week tuned in to see Roads to Discovery and New Horizons. In many cities during the early 1960s, educational television was sent only to public schools on a closed circuit. KERA and DISD pioneered educational broadcasting. Many of the programs were screened again at night so school children could show their parents shows they particularly liked. Farnell's programs preceded Newsroom, a single-story local newscast by Jim Lehrer, a Dallas Morning News writer who went on to create the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour for PBS. Born Barbara Helen Cooper in 1924, Farnell grew up during the Depression. Her father, Hedley Cooper, was a British immigrant who became the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's concertmaster. After graduation from Woodrow Wilson High School, Farnell attended Trinity University and North Texas State University, where she graduated with a degree in linguistics. Spanish language skills won her a job as an air traffic controller in Brownsville and, later, Dallas Love Field. Following the end of World War II she married Navy officer Hugh DeVoss and moved to Oak Cliff where she lived for the next 66 years. Before going to KERA, Farnell worked as a sixth grade teacher at the Anson Jones and George Peabody elementary schools in Oak Cliff. In 1960, at the start of the Mercury Project, a NASA program that laid the foundation for the Gemini and Apollo moon explorations, she became an aerospace expert and spent a summer of 1961 teaching in England. "I figured I better update my B-29 knowledge to the modern jet age," she told the Dallas Times Herald in an August 1961 story. The science of space exploration often was featured in Farnell's television programs, which also contained less serious features appealing to 12 year olds. During a weeklong series on Alaska she inserted a segment Indian ice cream made from a recipe consisting of lard, melted fish and moose fat whipped with sugar and raisins. "I got the recipe from an Alaskan missionary who said he took one bite of the ice cream and couldn't get rid of the taste for days," she later confided to a local news reporter. Inside the DISD, Farnell's greatest success was the Community Resources Field Trip Program that she started in 1972. As program coordinator she obtained active cooperation from over 400 organizations in the Dallas area that agreed to serve as "classrooms without walls" for students. By 1976, 122,574 DISD students a year were making career-oriented field trips to industrial assembly lines, soft drink companies, food processing plants and state hospitals. The program was cited by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare as "outstanding" in in the area of career education. "Educators and community leaders realize that a field trip is no longer frivolous, a reward for good behavior or a luxury, but a necessary part of a child's learning process," Farnell said in a 1977 Dallas newspaper article. An enthusiastic diarist and poet whose work appeared in a Texas Sesquicentennial book of poems called From Hide and Horn, Farnell spent her retirement years with her second husband, Joseph Farnell, traveling and working as a volunteer museum guide at The Science Place. In 1981, she was nominated for Outstanding Dallas Volunteer for her museum tours and for eight years of helping immigrant children learn to speak better English. In 1998, Farnell published My Twentieth Century Life, a memoir of Texas life during the middle years of the 20th century. Barbara DeVoss Farnell is survived by daughter Diane Whatley Brown of Longview and her husband Michael Brown and son David DeVoss, a journalist presently working in Baghdad, Iraq for the U.S. Agency for International Development. She also has three grand children, Thomas and Matthew DeVoss of Los Angeles and Jennifer Whatley Ogilvie of Longview plus three great grand daughters – Madeline, Nanette and Laurel – in Longview. Funeral services are scheduled for 1 p.m. Sunday Feb 5 at the Restland Memorial Chapel at 9220 Restland Rd. in Dallas. Those wishing to visit the family are invited to the Restland Funeral Home on Saturday, Feb. 4 from 5 to 7 p.m.